Monthly Data on Births and Deaths Registered in Scotland

This page contains monthly data on births and deaths registered in Scotland.

It also contains a new table (Table 6) which includes data on births by month of occurrence.

Table 1 presents the numbers of births registered in Scotland, and each National Health Service (NHS) Board area, for every month since 1990.

Table 2 presents the numbers of births registered in Scotland, and each council area, for every month since 1996.

Table 3 presents the numbers of deaths registered in Scotland, and each National Health Service (NHS) Board area, for every month since 1990.

Table 4 presents the numbers of deaths registered in Scotland, and each council area, for every month since 1996. 

Table 5 presents the numbers of deaths registered in Scotland, by certain causes of death, for every month since 2000.

Table 6 presents the numbers of births which occurred in Scotland, for every month since 1990. This includes the number of births in each month, rather than the number of registrations, to provide more useable data on the number of births during the part of 2020 when registration of births was postponed, and the subsequent months when all of the postponed registrations took place.

Table 7 presents the age-standardised mortality rate (ASMR) for Scotland, for every month from 2000.

The alphabetical order of the council areas changed in September 2016 and December 2016 due to adoption of the preferred forms of reference to the Edinburgh and Western Isles council areas. Previous versions of these tables used the forms 'Edinburgh, City of' and 'Eilean Siar'.

Please note that there may be some minor discrepancies between the figures which are given here and those that are appear in the Quarterly and Preliminary Annual tables, because the tables may have been extracted at different times, and a small number of records may have been added to the statistical database in the intervening period.

The table below has been made available as an Excel spreadsheet and can be viewed as Comma Seperated Value (CSV) files from a Zipped folder and in Adobe Acrobat Portable Document Format (PDF).

When opening the spreadsheet file your browser, depending on how it's been configured, will prompt to either open the file or save it to disk.
Maximum file size is 239 KB.

Notes (63 KB PDF file) 

Date of registration versus date of occurrence

All routine vital events information we publish is based on the date of registration, not the date on which the event occurred. Inevitably, of course, there are delays between the occurrence of an event and its registration. From the information held on NRS databases it is possible to derive data relating to the actual date of the event. For detailed studies of short time periods we recommend that users consider using such data. For all enquiries on data availability please email our Statistics Customer Services.

Time taken to register deaths

Statistics of the numbers of days between the dates on which events occurred and were registered are available from a separate section of our website:  Births and Deaths: Days until Registration